Cleaning out the inbox

Time to clean the inbox without any tributes and we start with three different stories from The Athletic.

With the dearth of sports news other than NFL Draft items, The Athletic has focused on terrific stories from the past and our starting link is a story that is new to me!

In May 1971, the Cincinnati Reds are at Dodger Stadium playing the Dodgers and as Maury Wills takes his lead off second base, Reds second baseman Woody Woodward moves towards the bag to give his pitcher Jim McGlothlin an avenue to try to pick Wills off second, if he chooses.
As Woodward arrives at the bag, a sudden noise startles the stadium as an object fell out of the sky and slammed into the ground where Woodward had been standing.
The bag split upon impact (no kidding) and spread flour all over the infield.
After cleanup, the game continued without incident, but what happened?
Apparently, a small private plane decided to screw around and dropped the flour from the air along with a second bag (no word on if that bag contained sugar) landing in the parking lot.
The Pedro Gomez penned piece discusses why this hasn't made more of an impact (rimshot) with baseball historians and also reports that newspaper recaps indicate that during the same game (and possibly the same time frame) the stadium was enthralled with a chicken running across the outfield.
No further report on the chicken, but the Dodgers did consider signing the chicken as a flychaser in the outfield.

Dr. Meredith Wills investigated an issue that baseball fans had been wondering about for a few months- Why and how did the 2019 postseason suddenly see power numbers drop after record-setting numbers for the regular season?
The answer?
The baseball.
The 2019 baseball had been proven previously to have lower seams and a rounder baseball and therefore carried farther when hit due to less drag through the air, but Wills shows that not all of the 2019 baseballs were from the same batch at those used in 2019 season games with many being new, but older baseballs.
I won't ruin the rest of the story with how this happened, but you have to love baseball and their reaction to every problem with the game- Deny, Deny, Deny...

The final article from The Athletic is from their Indians beat writer Zack Meisel.
Many of the beat writers across the league have been looking back on famous trades involving their covered teams, but with a twist.
The "Trade Tree" takes a famous trade and goes back to the past to look at how a player was acquired and then into the future with what the return (or returns) bounty contained when that player was shipping away.
This version of Trade Tree wasn't limited to one player though as Meizel writes of how John Hart built the powerhouse Indians of the mid-90s through his various swaps.
The centerpiece deal is the 1989 trade of Joe Carter to the Padres in exchange for Sandy Alomar.Jr., Carlos Baerga, and Chris James, but the tree also branches back to obtaining Carter from the Cubs for Rick Sutcliffe, the theft of Sutcliffe from the Dodgers and the trade to obtain and transfer out Matt Williams with the Tribe's 1997 World Series run in between.

Terry Pluto writes for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about how recently deceased football Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell (More on Mitchell in the next passings post) was part of the power struggle between Art Modell and Paul Brown that ended with Brown being fired and Cleveland being stuck with Modell until he scurried off to Baltimore in 1996.
It was Brown that decided to trade Mitchell and the Browns first-round selection in the 1962 draft to Washington for the first pick in the draft, 1961 Heisman winner Ernie Davis.
Davis would be diagnosed with leukemia and would never play for the Browns, but there was a point that Davis went into remission and wanted to play.
Art Modell backed Davis and found a doctor that cleared Davis for play, but Brown refused to take a chance and Davis never hit the field.
The decision split Modell and Brown for good and after a 7-6-1 1962 season, Brown was fired in January and Davis would pass away in May of 1963.
Modell's Browns would win the 1964 title and no others before he left town.
Paul Brown would be named to the Hall of Fame and would build the Cincinnati Bengals from scratch.
Another note is this- Paul Brown owned 15 percent of the Browns and sold that to Modell for 500,000 dollars raising the question of what would have happened had Brown raised the money to buy the team rather than Modell?
In my opinion, the Browns would have never left for Baltimore, but they would have been stuck with Mike Brown running them all these years.
I'm not sure that would have been a huge upgrade.

The Ringer interviews actor and former WCW champion David Arquette about why he is still wrestling at 48 years old and for next to no money.
Arquette nearly lost his life in a "death match" in 2018 and there is an accompanying documentary on him to be released soon and it's pretty interesting to see how Arquette feels towards wrestling.
The steep decline of WCW began after a silly idea to briefly make Arquette their world champion and the fans were not only upset about the decision, they turned on everyone involved.
I can't say I'm a fan of Arquette, but it's still a pretty interesting article.

CNN's science department writes of the discovery of data from the Voyager 2 mission that shows the need for a return to Uranus and Neptune.
The discovery is that Voyager traveled through a small plasmoid, which is a magnetic bubble pinched off a planet and then sent off into space.
The plasmoid is the first discovered from the Voyager missions and will hopefully be followed up by missions to one or both planets.

Title Bout

I've written before about playing various games through the years and even yesterday with what I've been playing with Action PC during quarantine, but I'm not sure that I have ever written about the game that I played before any other.

Title Bout was a board game from the company Avalon Hill and had licensing for their sports games from Sports Illustrated.
SI often carried ads in their magazine for the sports games from Avalon Hill, which had some popularity, but not to the degree of their top competitors in Strat-O-Matic and APBA. Even at that age, I was a rabid boxing fan, so it was Title Bout that I wanted most.

The first edition came out in 1979, and strategy games were usually something that didn't hit stores in Hagerstown in an era of only a few places to shop.

Hagerstown did have two toy stores, neither of which would remind anyone of Toys R Us, but an occasion to visit either was one to relish.

One was located on the outskirts of downtown and wasn't really a part of retail shopping, as it wasn't near the downtown shopping area.

At the turn of the decade, Hagerstown's downtown area was already showing the signs of deterioration from the Long Meadow Shopping Center's arrival in the late '60s and the Valley Mall's 1974 opening, but still, Juvenile Sales wasn't even a convenient stop from there, as anyone familiar with the one-way maze-like streets that plague the Hub City to this day.

My mom might have taken me to Juvenile once or twice a year as a kid, and I only remember bits of information about the store.
I remember more about their move to the North End, into what was then vacated by the Safeway grocery store, in an attempt to stay alive.
I took Ryan there a lot as a small child, but they didn't last more than a few years before going out of business.

The other store was KB Toys, which would file for bankruptcy in 2009, but at its peak, KB Toys seemed to be in every mall in the country, and if your town didn't have a Toys R Us, KB Toys was the closest thing, even though it was small and somewhat limited in its stock.

However, KB Toys must have signed an agreement with Avalon Hill as they sold a few of the sports games, but mostly the company's war and historical games, which could be quite hard to understand at my age (or even older, as I remember my buddy Greg and I buying t

heir Vietnam game and being so confused that we returned it!) were the main portion of the supply.
One day, as I looked around KB, I discovered Title Bout in stock, and it was at the top of my want list.

I don't recall the expense, but it was a bit salty for me at the time to just purchase or have my mom buy for me without a reason.
My guess is that it was around 15 dollars, so in the early 80s, fifteen dollars was equal (to this chart anyway) to 47 dollars today.

I do recall how I bought it, though.
As a kid, I always wanted to work in sportscasting, and although I was a pretty decent player in Little League, I had no illusions of being a future pro.
Still, I was moving up to senior league (then ages 13,14, and 15) and was on the field warming up during tryouts, when my dad called to me.
The senior league had just two teams and I was afraid I'd get drafted by one that was managed by a gentleman with an agenda- I had made the All-Star team over his son the previous year and we both played first base and my dad had told me that this fellow had told him he wanted to draft me and "with my son and Shawn" we should be set.
Dad knew how that was going to go- his son would be at first base and I'd be exiled to the outfield, which didn't exactly fit my less-than-nimble skillset!
Dad told me this, but he had other news- I could leave right now and talk to a league president to be the "voice" of the league from the press box, announcing the game, keeping score, and not to be underestimated- earn twenty dollars a week!

That was a huge sum, and having money in my pocket to do something I loved (did I mention money?) certainly beat playing out of position and seldom behind someone that I had proven to be the superior player.
I never played another organized baseball game again, but I spent four years in the booth and loved every minute of it.

Title Bout was my purchase with my first payday, and that game traveled with me everywhere.
It was in the booth as I held matches between innings.
It was on my lap on vacations to Ohio, Arkansas, and Florida (watch the video below to imagine the two boards across my lap in the back seat) and it even (along with other games) traveled with me in the car to help pass the time between the end of the school day and dates with Cherie, if I couldn't find a pickup basketball game to play in.

I won't get too detailed about the game itself because you can watch the video below ( if interested, you'll understand the logistics of the game) and get a feel for the game and what the board and fighter cards looked like, but the one thing that I didn't like about the game was the gameplay without dice.
Using "action" cards as Avalon Hill did, you could start expecting certain results to happen in the deck (if they had not been played to that point), and it took some of the spontaneity from the game that dice rolls can bring away.

This was a trademark of Avalon Hill games, as we played Statis Pro football a lot with Greg, Ryan, and me over the years, and you could almost feel a big play coming up (Handoff to Bruce Harper) from the card deck.

I had eight-man tournaments, sixteen-man tournaments, title defenses, and supercards brought to mind from the greats of the fight game and the stars of the late 70s (remember my card set was 1979 or 1980), which would often be named by whatever place that I was playing at or watching on TV.
I had tons of this stuff that is either gone or in the attic somewhere, and I remember playing after work with two guys that I worked with inside the restaurant (Super Show at the Burger Dome?) as we fried up various burgers that never hit the menu at Burger Chef.

Title Bout was the first of many sports games that I've played, and what I like best about sports games is that they are only constrained by the imagination, even to this day, with the computer games that I play.
Title Bout is still in the attic, and I think Ryan even played it some when he was still at home, and even if I never play it again, I don't have the heart to move it along.

Too many memories and too many nights spent with the company of cards like Alfonso Zamora, Yoko Gushiken, and Danny "Little Red" Lopez to recall to give to Goodwill or sell for a few quarters on eBay.

The passings are already filling up sadly, but I'll be cleaning the inbox next time with a few articles of interest.

Counting Flowers on the Wall

Covid-19 certainly has made keeping busy a challenge without sports.
While I've been working regular hours (and extra this week), I've been trying to follow the edict to stay inside and away from the vulnerable folks.
Decisions to follow or not has to be a choice made by each individual and I respect that, if not agree.

However, I'm not going to live with ending someone's life because I  think Covid-19 cannot reach me, so I've visited no one and seen few other than Ryan, going to work and whomever I would see while gathering supplies.
When I type that, I sound like I'm Radar O'Reilly getting ready to hit Kempo to trade a case of beets for some penicillin to keep the 4077th afloat!

To a certain degree and without live sports and the roster freeze that baseball has enacted due to the virus, it seems like all I've been writing about of late has been tributes.
And while I think of the tributes posts as just that, I can't lie and say too many in a short period isn't pretty depressing.
Many times I feel like I'm just killing time with sorting 2020 Topps Heritage ( If anyone reading this has any of the short prints, let me know as I'm trying to make those as part of my set), binging television shows, playing games, and what seems often to be counting Flowers on the wall.
Hence, the above picture of the Statler Brothers and contrary to popular belief, that photo is not a 1971 Heimberger family outing!
BTW- The Statlers made some great music, but once Lew DeWitt got sick and the little short guy with the shrill voice came in, the Statlers became more of a comedy team that sang rather than a great singing group.


So, what have I been watching and doing specifically?
I've watched the entire run of the CBS program "Under The Dome" which I thought was pretty good for the first two seasons and its final season was pretty weak and I barely finished the season.
I've also finished a long-time favorite in "Cold Case" and Cherie and I have begun "Without A Trace", another past favorite that Cherie and I haven't seen in quite a while.
I've been watching "Star Trek" on DVD at work, finishing the original series and moving on to the 1973 animated version before I'll start "Deep Space Nine".
I always like to bring the shows that lasted a while to the road office because it enables me to skip watching for a bit if I need a change occasionally.
Work has also added "Criminal Minds" as it's on every night as I work and it's pretty good from what I've seen, although some seasons are better than others.
Unlike Cold Case and Without a Trace, Criminal Minds was hit off and on with cast changes and some characters I like better than others, so when they aren't around, those episodes aren't quite as good.

I've also been watching YouTube videos with people who treasure hunt with metal detectors and underwater diving.
I've mentioned that Cherie and Rachel purchased me a detector for Christmas and I'm trying to learn more about how to use it before I take it out seriously.
I might be using it more often this year than I expected with the minor league baseball season heavily shortened at best and eliminated at worst, so I'm enjoying getting to know how detectors work and what to expect.

You might have noticed a lack of sports at this point.
To my surprise, I haven't missed things as much as I expected.
That doesn't mean that I don't miss sports, but that I have been able to fill that hole thus far with other programming.
Let's see if that continues as the quarantine drags on.

And with all this time, I've been playing various seasons of Action PC sports.
I just finished a replay of the 1967 NFL season that ended with the Los Angeles Rams of George Allen defeating Tom Landry's Dallas Cowboys in the NFL championship game 20-14 in double overtime to win the title when Rams linebacker Maxie Baughan intercepted a Don Meredith pass and ran twenty-five yards for the championship-winning score.
I was in the middle of that project when the quarantine hit, so that wasn't a new season.
I'll likely be beginning the 1968 AFL season next as I played the 1967 AFL season last year with Joe Namath and the New York Jets winning that title over the Oakland Raiders.

I haven't started a baseball project as I am trying to decide just what season I'd like to play.
When you play a 154 or 162 game season, you see these teams for quite a while, so I want to make sure that I want to play a certain team for a while.
Contenders are the 1951 Giants, 1971 Indians, 1977 Rangers, 1979 Indians, and 1990 Pirates along with a possible "Ball Four" replay in which I replay the 1969 Seattle Pilots until Jim Bouton is traded to Houston and when I would then jump to the Astros.

I've started a hockey season months ago and I've played in starts and stops with the expansion 1974-75 Kansas City Scouts.
The Scouts were terrible and finished ahead of only fellow expansion mate Washington in the standings with a record of 15-54-11.
My version of the Scouts has played about as bad as one would expect with five wins, seventeen losses, and a tie.
The funny part of these Scouts so far- four of their five wins were over Atlanta and Vancouver, both of whom are in first place in their division.
I don't score a lot with the expansion Scouts and as I attempt to compete, I play a much more defensive game to keep the games close.
Kansas City's first-round pick Wilf Paiement, who is one of two players on the team to have a nice career, is tied for the team lead with Ed Gilbert with only seven goals.
Paiement scored 26 goals on the season to tie Simon Nolet for the team lead in the actual season.

I started a basketball season yesterday and decided to move oppositely from the Scouts as I'm playing the same 1974-75 season with the ABA champion Kentucky Colonels.
The Colonels lost their first game 118-113 at home to the Denver Nuggets.
The Nuggets finished the regular season with the league's best record, so that's not an awful defeat.
Kentucky rebounded to even their record at 1-1 with a 126-117 home win over the Indiana Pacers.
Artis Gilmore scored 28 points in the win with Louie Dampier adding 27 for the victorious Colonels.

There you have it- how I've been running the Four Corners offense to wind down the clock.
Next time, I'll have some recent links of note, and if any of these interests you, let me know.
I might be able to work another post out of this.

Cleaning out the inbox-Non-Sports Passings

The passings tributes continue with an all non-sports version and the loss of an actor that brought an underrated great character to life starts the post.

Goodbye to David Schramm at the age of 73.
Schramm had been working in theatre in recent years but will be remembered most for his portrayal of Roy Biggins, the slimy and grouchy owner of Aeromass Airlines on the NBC sitcom Wings in the 1990s.
Biggins and Aeromass always topped the Hackett brothers in success on Nantucket, but Biggins usually came out on the short end on things that didn't involve business.
Biggins was an angry character that was capable of the occasional surprise such as one episode where Schramm dances with Tony Shaloub in a stunning dance for a big man, showing amazingly light feet and dancing technique.
Wings was a very funny show that often didn't receive the kudos that it deserved- David Schramm was a big part of the quality of the program.


Goodbye to Adam Schlesinger at the age of 52.
Schlesinger won Emmy and Grammy awards for various singing and songwriting projects but saw his most commercial success in 2003 when the group that he co-founded Fountains of Wayne broke through with "Stacy's Mom", which is very well-remembered but only reached a high of 21 on the American charts.
Fountains of Wayne's album that included "Stacy's Mom"- "Welcome Interstate Managers" is one of my favorite albums of the last 20 years or so and Fountains of Wayne are far more of a gem to listen to than only their top hit.
Schlesinger also wrote the title song and others in the 1997 film "That Thing You Do", which was a Tom Hanks project that followed a one-hit-wonder group set in Erie, Pennsylvania in the 1960s.


Goodbye to Lyle Waggoner at the age of 84.
Waggoner was one of the 1970s busiest actors in Hollywood as a long-time cast member of the Carol Burnett Show and Wonder Woman as "Steve Trevor" as well as appearing on many game shows along with anthology programs such as Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
Waggoner was most often used in the "hunk" role on these programs as the stereotypical swaggering male of the era but wasn't as dim as his characters often were as I remember him doing quite well on game shows and seemed like a pretty quick-witted guy.
Waggoner might have been remembered differently had his career broken in one direction as it was Waggoner that finished second to Adam West for the lead role in Batman.
The battle with West was so close that Waggoner actually did a screen test in the Batcave in full costume in order for the people making the decision to see both actors on set and in regalia before giving the nod to West.


Goodbye to Al Worden at the age of 88.
Worden was the Command Module Pilot for Apollo 15's 1971 flight to the Moon and was part of the "great stamp fiasco" in which the crew brought a few hundred commemorative covers along on the mission.
Upon return, they sold some of these and despite past astronauts taking items on their missions, NASA decided to draw a line in the sand and none of the three would ever fly for the agency again.
Worden would later lose a bid for Congress from Florida and write his memoirs.

Goodbye to Bobbie Battista at the age of 67.
Battista was the main anchor for Headline News for years  (later on the CNN flagship) along with Lynne Russell and during the 80s and 90s in Atlanta, if there was breaking news one of those two would be on the air.
Battista also was a host of "Talk Back Live", which was a live studio show with an audience that would be allowed to ask questions to the guests.
Talk Back Live wasn't really memorable to me other than the hilarious parody that Vince Cellini did on "Calling All Sports". which I wish that YouTube had available!

Well, that catches us up on recent passings and hopefully, folks will stay healthy so we don't have to do another one of these soon.
However, there is one more inbox to work on before some other posts can start so stay tuned for those!

Cleaning out the Inbox-More Passings

The effort to continue to catch up on recent passings continues and we start with a boxing passing.

Goodbye to Roger Mayweather at the age of 58.
Known more by current boxing fans as the trainer of his nephew Floyd Mayweather, Jr, Roger Mayweather was quite a talented fighter in his own right as he held both the WBA junior lightweight and WBC junior welterweight titles in his career in the ring.
"The Black Mamba" dethroned long-time WBA junior lightweight champion, Sammy Serrano, in Serrano's native Puerto Rico by an eighth-round stoppage and after two exciting title defenses, a unification fight against another undefeated champion in Hector "Macho" Camacho was beginning to be whispered about as one of the better fights to be made at the time.
That fight would never occur as Mayweather was knocked out in one round by Rocky Lockridge to lose his title and even though Mayweather would have success later in his career, the entertaining "Black Mamba" was never the same, in the same manner as Camacho's style changing after being badly hurt by Edwin Rosario and became more of a boxer than an aggressive puncher from distance.
Mayweather didn't win a title at lightweight but did score a knockdown over defensive wizard Pernell Whitaker in a unanimous decision defeat.
Mayweather would win a title at 140 pounds via knockout over Rene Arrendondo and defend it four times before losing for the second time to Julio Cesar Chavez.


Goodbye to Hedgemon Lewis at the age of 74.
Lewis challenged for the world welterweight title on three occasions losing twice to the great Jose "Mantaquilla" Napoles and losing to John H. Stracey via tenth round knockout in what would be the final fight of the career of Lewis.
Lewis was once recognized as the champion by the New York State Athletic Commission at a time when that designation held some measure of respect when he defeated former world champion, Billy Backus.
The loss to Stracey followed two draws by Lewis in three weeks in late 1975 to future WBC champion Carlos Palomino and future title challenger Harold Weston Jr.
Upon retirement, Lewis would train and work corners with two of the best trainers in history in Eddie Futch and Freddie Roach.
Lewis was one of those unlucky fighters that was very good, but not quite great and born at a time with a dominant champion (Napoles) that was just a little better.
Hedgemon Lewis also has a spot in the TRS memory bank as well and I'll tell that story on another day.


Goodbye to War Emblem at the age of 21.
The winner of the 2002 Kentucky Derby and Preakness, War Emblem won the Eclipse Award for the champion three-year-old colt for that year.
A frontrunner that had to take the lead or run poorly, War Emblem burned out his challengers in the Derby and Preakness, but refused to "rate" in the Belmont after stumbling badly out of the starting gate, and finished well out of contention.
War Emblem was well-known for his intolerance for what seemed to be anything around him- animal or human as trainer Bob Baffert gave him the nickname "Hannibal Lecter" for his habitual biting of everyone around him.
War Emblem would win the Haskell Invitational after the Belmont but would lose both of his starts against older horses before being retired at stud in Japan.
Imported to Japan, War Emblem showed little interest in mares and rarely got mares into foal.
Returned to the United States four years ago, War Emblem again showed no desire to copulate, but since he was returned from Japan to be a stallion and he wasn't up to the task, War Emblem was gelded for him to stay in the country.


Goodbye to Ed Farmer at the age of 70.
Farmer spent time with eight major league teams but spent his best years as a reliever with the White Sox with 54 saves for the White Sox from 1979-81.
Farmer's best season of the three came in 1980 when Farmer earned 30 saves, finished with an ERA of 2.43 and made his only All-Star team.
Farmer would work on the White Sox radio broadcasts from 1991 to 2005 and was known as "Eatin' Ed" during his career.
1980 was the best year of Farmer's career, but it had its share of controversy as well.
In 1979, Farmer hit Kansas City's Al Cowens in the face with a pitch, breaking Cowens' jaw and busted several teeth of the Royals outfielder in forcing him to the disabled list.
The following season, after Cowens was traded to Detroit, the two faced each other at Comiskey Park with Cowens grounding out to shortstop Todd Cruz.
As Farmer looked over at Cruz fielding the ball, Cowens ran to the mound, jumped Farmer, and began to pummel the pitcher as the benches cleared.
Farmer threatened legal action but agreed to drop it in return for a handshake with Cowens to bury the hatchet.
Neither player would star after 1980, but to be fair to Cowens, he looked to be a potential star in the making (Cowens finished second in the MVP voting in 1977) before the beaning and he never reached the expected heights after that.


Goodbye to Carl Tacy at the age of 87.
Tacy was the head coach at Wake Forest for thirteen seasons from 1972 to 1985 and took Wake Forest to the Elite Eight twice during what might have been the toughest era for the "Big Four" ACC schools in the state of North Carolina.
During Tacy's years at Wake Forest, North Carolina, and N.C. State won national championships (N.C.State twice) with Duke making the national title game.
Tacy's teams won more than twenty games five times, four of those in Tacy's final five seasons, but his last team finished only 15-14 and Tacy knew that things were going to get worse with recruiting on the downside and decided to retire.
Wake Forest's roster was so bare that Tacy's successor Bob Staak would put one of the worst teams in ACC history on the court in Staak's first season, finished 0-14 in-conference and only two of those losses were by fewer than ten points.

Browns sign Adrian Clayborn

Sometimes in life, you may want something and not purchase it, only to have a chance to pick it up down the road.
Many times when that occurs, you realize that you could live without it or the task that you truly needed it for wasn't needed as much as it once was and it was a small disappointment.

The Cleveland Browns signing of veteran defensive end Adrian Clayborn made me think of that situation as a search of the site saw Clayborn as a "player of interest' when he entered the league via the draft and one off-season as a preferred free-agent target.
Clayborn signed a two-year contract with a value of 5.75 million over the contract but could make more than double that number by hitting his incentives in the contract.

Clayborn was a first-round selection by Tampa Bay in 2011, left for Atlanta via free agency in 2015 and played three seasons with the Falcons before signing with New England in 2018 and returning to Atlanta last season.
Clayborn's numbers have dropped in the last two seasons since his career-high with the Falcons in 2017 with nine and a half sacks, but as a situational player, Clayborn should have enough left to help the Browns, who seem to be leaning towards keeping Olivier Vernon rather than release him at the defensive end opposite Myles Garrett.
Clayborn started one game for Atlanta last season and finished with four and a half sacks with two forced fumbles for the Falcons, who missed the playoffs for the second season in a row.
Clayborn is the second free agent that the Browns have signed in the off-season as they signed defensive tackle Andrew Billings from the Bengals earlier in the period.

I like the signing of Clayborn for the specialist role and the Browns do need depth at defensive end as Olivier Vernon has struggled with injuries over the last three seasons (two of those seasons with the Giants), but Clayborn isn't the type of player that will rack up more numbers with more playing time.
Clayborn turns 32 during training camp and he'll wear down if the Browns are forced to use him too often.
While the Browns aren't exactly loaded at defensive end with Garrett, Vernon, Clayborn, and Chad Thomas, they aren't the worst team in the league off the edge either.
I wouldn't argue if the Browns decided to draft an end or even another veteran if one can be signed at a reasonable rate as they'll be relying on two veterans that have seen their games slip in recent campaigns.

Back later with more from the inbox.

Cleaning out the inbox- Passings

During this time of Covid-19, sadly there are plenty of passings to note.
Hopefully, the page of passings will not get larger too quickly.
To keep the posts fairly short, I'll be breaking down the tributes in three categories- Big Four team sports, smaller sports, and non-sports.

Goodbye to Jimmy Wynn at the age of 78.
Wynn possessed one of the best nicknames in baseball in the "Toy Cannon", which was given for Wynn's height (5'9) and impressive power.
Wynn was handicapped by playing in the Astrodome for most of his career but still hit over 20 homers seven times with the Astros.
Wynn's 37 homers in 1967 set a team record and Wynn finished with 107 RBI during that season, but his best season might have been 1974 with the Dodgers, who traded for Wynn in the off-season for pitcher Claude Osteen, hitting .271 with 32 homers and 108 RBI for the National League champions.
Wynn finished fifth in the MVP voting for the National League and Wynn had a legitimate argument for winning over teammate and eventual winner Steve Garvey.
Wynn's career went downhill after 1974 and was gone from baseball after 1977, but worked for the Astros front office and on television for years after retirement.


Goodbye to Ted Cox at the age of 65.
Cox played for the Red Sox, Indians, Mariners, and Blue Jays in a five-year career that had interesting notes for a career that wasn't all that special or lengthy on the surface.
Cox first made news in a spring training appearance that saw Ted Williams compliment the swing of Cox and stated that Cox had batting title potential.
Cox was the minor league player of the year in 1977 and was thought to be an All-Star in the making as the Red Sox brought him to Boston in September.
Cox quickly set a major league record for hits to start a career with hits in his first six at-bats and hit .362 for the month to become the major position player that Cleveland received in a package for Dennis Eckersley in the following off-season.
Cox would hit a combined .224 with only five homers in two years with the Indians and two years and two teams later, Cox exited the game.
Cox still had one more achievement of note as it was a double against Toronto that was the first-ever game-winning RBI in American League history for Seattle in 1980.
1980 was the inaugural season that the statistic had been tallied with Seattle and Toronto playing in the first game to be completed.

Goodbye to Mike Stratton at the age of 78.
Stratton made six All-AFL teams at linebacker for the Buffalo Bills and started for the only two championship teams in Bills history in 1964 and 1965.
Stratton is most remembered for his vicious hit on Chargers running back Keith Lincoln in the 1964 AFL title game that knocked the San Diego star from the game with two broken ribs and deflated the defending champions in a game that crowned Buffalo's first of two AFL titles.
Stratton played his first eleven years of his twelve-year career in Buffalo before finishing his career with San Diego in 1972.


Goodbye to Benny Malone at the age of 68.
Malone was the second-round draft pick by the Dolphins in 1974 after rushing for over 1,100 yards as a senior at Arizona State.
Malone's biggest NFL moment was with Miami (he would later play for the Redskins) when Malone smashed through the Oakland Raiders for a 23-yard touchdown run to give the two-time defending champion Dolphins a lead with just over two minutes remaining.
However, this was the famous "Sea of Hands" game and Oakland marched down the field for a touchdown to eliminate the Dolphins and stop their reign.
Had Miami held on, the Malone run would likely be one of the more memorable runs in NFL playoff history.


Goodbye to Henri Richard at the age of 84.
The "Pocket Rocket" and brother of Maurice "Rocket" Richard, Henri holds the record for most Stanley Cups won by a player with eleven and spent his entire career with Montreal as a Canadien.
Unlike his older brother, who was a goal-scoring star, Henri was noted for his passing and led the league in assists twice.
Richard's eleven championships are more than any other athlete in the major sports except for Bill Russell, who matched Richard's eleven titles during his run with the Boston Celtics.
Richard was also named as one of the NHL's top 100 players in 2017.


Next time, I'll be writing about the latest Browns signing and it's a player that I was hoping that the Browns would have signed five years ago.